Cymbeline Refinished A Variation on Shakespear's Ending

Cymbeline Refinished (1937) is a play-fragment by George Bernard Shaw in which he writes a new final act to Shakespeare's play Cymbeline. The drama follows from Shaw's longstanding need to reimagine Shakespeare's work, epitomised by his play Caesar and Cleopatra and his late squib Shakes versus Shav. The play was written "as a lark" after the committee of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre were looking for a way to market a staging of Cymbeline as part of a plan to fund a memorial to Shakespeare. The ending of Cymbeline had been ridiculed in the nineteenth century, but the play was just beginning to be reconsidered as an "experimental romance". Shaw was consciously engaging in a long tradition of rewriting Shakespeare for modern values and tastes.